Who Might Still Be Trying To Survive Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Skipping through the hard courts of Mexico,
And someone else dies:
As the purples bloom on a wedding vest- the brown
Excursions through the monsters of the Bosque:
The way sometimes a wanderer must leave his family to
Convalesce in a foreign country with no one that he loves,
Until the babies are born novel underneath the
Crepuscule of school buses;
And it all comes back around and touches itself after school:
Where I’ve seen you in the shadows,
Alma, playing with the confederates, arms filled with
Cheap prizes of their popgun games,
While the entire extent off it rose up above your head; blowing
Thunderously,
Teetering like something the municipalities would never allow:
As I caracoled your neighborhood with the Virgin of
Guadalupe looking out the back of my car
To cast a spell of fortunate luck, like fishes won at a fair before
The cat’s eyes:
As if the entire graveyard was filled chock full of fireworks;
And your lips brushed across mine in the graveyards next door to
The university you’d never been to, but you came up breathlessly
In lips of brown sugar-
In cornfields of rattlesnakes- just trying to knock off to
The extravagant fire engines and they already headed towards
And trying to save just about anyone who might still
Be trying to survive.